Asia Times: Hunger in a land of plenty



	August 04, 1999	atimes.com

Southeast Asia

Hunger in a land of plenty

WASHINGTON - Indonesia became the world's largest food aid recipient last year in a ''manufactured crisis'' sparked by economic collapse but exacerbated by misguided development policies, says a new report.

Food aid to the world's fourth most-populous nation should be severely reduced "and redirected to truly starving countries . . . such as North Korea," according to the South East Asia Food Security and Fair Trade Council, a coalition of activist groups in the Asian region and the United States.

The group, which sent an international team of aid and agricultural experts to Indonesia earlier this year, concluded that Indonesia needs "not food aid but economic and agricultural reforms of a fundamental kind." This would create the "jobs and income that will enable them to surmount not only hunger, but poverty," the report said.

"Indonesia is not suffering a critical food shortage in the traditional sense," said Anuradha Mittal, report co-author and policy director at the San Francisco-based Institute for Food and Development Policy, also known as Food First.

"Abundant food is available for those who can afford it, but few can due to the economic collapse," Mittal said. "Yet the image of a food shortage that can only be remedied with food aid continues to dominate."

The report, "Manufacturing a Crisis: The Politics of Food Aid in Indonesia", accused the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and World Food Program (WFP) of stoking donor alarm over Indonesia's food situation by issuing "grossly mistaken" assessments of the country's 1998-99 rice shortfall.

The agencies, however, said they stood behind their figures.

Foreign grain began to pour into Indonesian warehouses on the strength of numbers distilled by the FAO and WFP from Indonesian government data in a process that activists characterized as doomed to repeat the failures of earlier food-aid programs.

"Time and again we have found [food aid] to be a self-serving act on the part of donor countries, in the guise of charity," said Peter Rosset, co-author of the 1998 book "World Hunger: Twelve Myths". "Local food production is undercut in recipient countries, as farmers cannot compete with free imports and have to abandon the land," he said.

The report charged the United States, Canada, Australia and other donors with seeking to open long-term markets for their surplus wheat and rice. It assailed Japan for dumping excess rice stocks in the form of a "soft loan" payable in kind within the next 40 years.

When it became clear that the influx of cheap food was not needed in much of the countryside, aid officials diverted the flow to Indonesia's slums "to pacify a restive urban population" and boost the ruling Golkar party's standing in June's parliamentary elections, the report added.

The report drew fire from the FAO and WFP as being "a bit confused" and "biased." Aid officials, in letters to the report's writers, bristled at the accusation of complicity in government efforts to contain political dissent and complained that they had been misquoted in the document. No less controversial was the report's assertion that Indonesia's was "not so much an emergency food crisis but a generalized crisis of development."

Viewed in the short term, the crisis stemmed from the massive flight of foreign capital that was at the center of the Asian financial crisis of 1997-98. But the long-term culprits, according to the report, included an "industry-first" development strategy and a "Green Revolution" (chemically-intensive monoculture farming) approach to food self-sufficiency.

Under the tutelage of international financial institutions, Indonesia had long sought to harness local capital and attract foreign investors to industrialize the country. Among other things, this meant manipulating exchange and interest rates.

These measures "drew resources from agriculture to industry because agricultural projects took a long time to yield a decent rate of return, whereas urban investments, such as in real estate, yielded profits with a quick turn-around time," the report said.

Furthermore, "a policy of providing cheap food was clearly designed to subsidize industry by keeping the price of wage goods low for the urban working class. However, this decreased the profitability of agriculture," contributing to a downward spiral of investment and productivity in the country's farms.

Something had to be done, so Indonesia embraced the "Green Revolution" and, in 1984, was deemed by the FAO to have achieved food self-sufficiency. The picture never was very clear, however, because rice self-sufficiency was taken to mean food self-sufficiency.

The "Green Revolution" forced rice on the many Indonesians who traditionally had subsisted on corn, roots, or other staples - and in turn forced a single model of wetland rice cultivation on geographically distinct regions, some of which were unsuited to this type of farming.

As a consequence, differences in nutritional needs and status were glossed over, as were local environmental conditions and bio-diversity. Paradoxically, food and ecological insecurity worsened in parts of the country even as more rice was produced.

"Thirty years of 'Green Revolution' has left many farmers dependent on expensive external inputs of seeds, fertilizers and pesticides," the report said. "The tragic results of this dependency became stark with the onset of the financial crisis in late 1997."

Imports were limited for want of foreign exchange and fertilizer subsidies were withdrawn, once again threatening agricultural production. Farmers have been further imperilled by an influx of 2.3 million tonnes of cheap or free emergency food aid from donor nations, the report asserts.

That aid effort should be redirected toward "truly starving countries" and Indonesian food aid restricted to pregnant and nursing women and children living below the poverty line, according to the report. In the longer term, the country should revive its agriculture without again succumbing to the ecological, economic and nutritional vagaries of chemically-intensive monoculture farming.

(Inter Press Service)

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